PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Visual Eloquence & Versatility of Boris Artzybasheff 2022

The Visual Eloquence & Versatility of Boris Artzybasheff 2022 Written and narrated by Pete Beard. It's a good introduction to a very unique artist and Pete manages to pack a lot of info and plenty of great art into a scant 13 mins.

I first ran across Boris when I picked up a new reprint of Charles G Finney's The Circus Of Dr Lao. It became one of my favorite books. The illustrations inside are even more interesting than the cover.

Boris started as a children's book author in the Ukraine. He escaped the country, and a death sentence, during the Russian Revolution. He wound up in New York. He started working as a children book illustrator and did that for 20 years.

His war era artwork for national magazines like Time and Life is simply stunning.

He would continue to create amazing images until he died at 66 in 1965.

Michael Garman Magic Town

Michael Garman is a sculpture who has his own museum in Colorado Springs. Magic Town is quite unique, 3000 square feet of large run down buildings and their inhabitants. Here's what one of the buildings looks like. The pedestal is about knee high on an adult.

You can watch a documentary on Michael on YouTube.

Perception Is A Tricky Thing

On Facebook someone posted this photo of a Maxfield Parrish print for sale for $100. I looked at it and immediately thought it was washed out, nearly all the colors, but the blue, had been faded by the sun. I'm a big fan of old posters that sit in store windows and slowly turn blue from the sun strangling the color out of them. Here's how the picture should look.

I wonder if that poster had never seen a better reproduction. I say that because a few days after I saw this post on Facebook I was watching one of the British antiques shows. This one has antiques experts buying stuff and trying to make a profit at auction. One of them bought a Parrish print of this same painting and it was washed out similarly to the Facebook post print. He was going on about the nice quality of the print and the frame on a 70-80 year old object. The painting, titled Daybreak, has been one of the best selling prints of all time, one in every 4 houses had one, so you can imagine how many are still around. Maybe that's the problem, most of the prints around have been hung so long they're all fading, and people just don't bother with books on the man and his work. Seems like a waste of money to buy an old print that's faded instead of buying a new reproduction and framing that.

Carl Barks And The Perversity Of Beasts, Machines, And Nature.

Carl Barks And The Perversity Of Beasts, Machines, And Nature.

Garth Danielson

I have been a fan of Carl Barks for over 40 years. I was a fan even before I knew who he was. Back in the golden, olden days Disney comic artists weren’t allowed to sign their work. In 1942, when Carl Barks and Jack Hannah drew the first original Donald Duck comic book story for Dell Four Color 9, the readers just thought he was Walt Disney. If they were savvy they knew Walt didn’t draw everything, let alone anything.

Weird Homes 1998

I saw Weird Homes on Amazon Prime. It's a 1998 Canadian show about artists who have transformed their homes into unusual places. It was fairly entertaining. Each episode looks at three places and there are 13 episodes. The places were varied and some less interesting than others. Many of the artists are found art types. We've also got a topiary guy in one episode and one of the found artists uses plants and flowers with the objects he brings home.

One of the artists they featured was Mark Bulwinkle. He lives in Oakland. A friend took me to his house in the 1980s. He's since moved into a larger piece of land with his own crane. Why a crane? He often works with big pieces of steel. He still has his old gate which I saw on his house. Someday I'll get those slides scanned and post them.

Victoria's Way

Victoria's Way is a sculpture park in Wicklow Ireland that has some interesting sculpture and an interesting guy behind the whole thing. Victor Langheld is a German of Irish ancestry who spent some good amount of time in India looking for himself. He's studied a lot of religion and philosophy. Not something I pretend to understand. I did like the sculpture.

That's the entrance to the grounds. Victor talks about the entrance on the video. It's a physical representation of the vagina dentate which is often what the entrances to temples are.

 

I found more pictures on the internet and saved them to Flickr. 

Virgil Finley and the Science Fiction Book Club

In the past I've been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club. I didn't usually last that long anytime I joined. I got the books I had to buy and dropped the membership after a year or so. The last time was in the 90's and the books were so terribly printed I didn't keep any of them. The SFBC club used to have these flyers with book listings that they called Things To Come.

Here's the cover to the December 1968 issue promoting Fred Hoyle's Element 79. I think I did read it but I can't remember. I only kept the front of the issue, because of the art, it's got a nice drawing by Virgil Finlay. All of these are Finlay's from other issues of Things To Come. I don't know which ones, I didn't keep the whole issue for any of these but it doesn't matter. It's the Virgil Finlay art that I like and the two color printing of Things To Come makes an interesting illustration. I've been scanning a lot of the images I kept out of material that passed through these hands. I chopped it up and kept small bits and pieces for future perusal. Now it's going digital.

The Umbrella Man by DOK (J C Hager) 1911

The book was published in 1911. I bought the book in 1993 from a shop in St Paul that isn't there anymore. I forgot the name, it was on 7th Street. The book was pretty much as you see it. The paper isn't yellowed, it's actually brown Kraft paper, kind of thick, say a 60# text maybe, and the cover is similar but much heavier.

    

You can see it's been well handled. I'm proud to say none of those stains on the cover are mine. The binding has been failing so I cut the pages out and scanned them.

I thought the cartoons were fun, there's that goofy head umbrella, and the duck is entertaining. I liked Hager's style and his work is nicely reproduced in black and orange.

You can read more about J C Hager on the Wikipedia.  You can see the whole book in my Flickr album.

Newt Boxtop

Back in the 1970s and 80s I used to publish a mystery magazine called Nick Boxtop Mystery Magazine. It went through 11 issues and a stand alone novella. As a bit of fun Ray Allard drew the Newt Boxtop piece below in 1980. Sadly it never got published in the magazine before it discontinued 9 years later. I think the drawing went into one fanzine or another. I'm still sorting all my old zines for scanning and eventually I'll have a better idea what was published and when. There are hundreds of zines and 2-3,000 pages to go through so it's going to take a while. Somewhere I might have a cut-out and colored version of the doll. It sat on my desk for years but it got put away. I just don't know where. I don't know who adapted the newt above either. I wish I did. I'll post it on Facebook and see if anyone remembers who might have done it.

Robbie's Daddy

Someone posted this on Facebook and I saved it.